Search Results (9)

Objective: This study on children in low-income families explored whether their mental health problems are attributable to distress from five socioeconomic disadvantage factors playing roles in the multiple disadvantage model. These factors are social disorganization, social structural factors, social relationships, health/mental health, and access to care factors. Methods: The present study employed data extracted from the 2021 National Survey of Children’s Health, describing 7540 low-income children. Weighted logistic regression was conducted (with robust standard errors). Results: It showed that such children were more likely to have mental health problems when seven variables were present. The variables were argumentative children, parents’ difficulty with parenting, children’s difficult peer relations, children being bullied, families’ problematic substance use, families’ use of public health insurance, and families’ difficulty accessing mental health services. In turn, children were less likely to have mental health problems in the presence of six variables: a rundown neighborhood, an unsafe neighborhood, children’s Hispanic ethnicity, children’s Asian ethnicity, children’s general good health, and parents’ good mental health. The present study’s findings support the multiple disadvantage model. Conclusions: That is, the five types of factors key to the model (social disorganization, social structural, social relationships, health/mental health, and access to care) were observed to be related to low-income children’s mental health problems. These findings’ three main implications for practice are that it is crucial to (a) ensure children receive mental health services they need; (b) facilitate effective parent–child communication; and (c) provide low-income families with psychoeducation. Their main implications for policy involve two domains. Improving physical environments and safety in poor neighborhoods is necessary, as is enforcing schools’ anti-bullying rules and using schools to foster students’ assertiveness. Full article

This study of ethnic Asian children in the United States asked whether their health exhibited relationship with any of six factors: social disorganization, social structural factors, social relationships, the health of their parents, their access to medical insurance, acculturation. The sample of 1350 ethnic Asian children was extracted from the 2018 National Survey of Children’s Health. Logistic regression results showed that these children’s excellent/very good/good health was associated positively with safe neighborhoods, family incomes, family cohesiveness, family support, and receipt of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). In turn, health was associated negatively with single-mother households. Implications of the present results in terms of interventions promoting family support, TANF participation, safe neighborhoods, and professionals’ cultural competency are discussed. Full article

Offender residences have become a research focus in the crime literature. However, little attention has been paid to the interactive associations between built environment factors and the residential choices of offenders. Over the past three decades, there has been an unprecedented wave of migrant workers pouring into urban centers for employment in China. Most of them flowed into urban villages within megacities. Weak personnel stability and great mobility have led to the urban villages to be closely related to decreased public safety and the deterioration of social order. The YB district in China was selected as the study area, which is located in one of the most developed cities in Southern China and has an area of approximately 800 km² and a population of approximately four million people. This study aims to explore the associations between the neighborhood environment and the offender residences by using the geographical detector model (GeoDetector) from the perspective of interaction. The conceptual framework is based on the social disorganization theory. The results found that urban villages were the most important variable with a relatively high explanatory power. In general, taking the urban village as the carrier, various places (hotels, entertainment places, and factories) within the urban village may be more likely to include offender residences. This study also found the social disorganization theory applicable in the non-Western context. These findings may have important implications for offender residences identification, crime prevention, and the management of urban villages in Chinese cities. Full article

Debates in urban social research indicate that one of the most significant problems facing cities of the global south is the dilemma of crime. This study explores the research question: what is the level of influence of economic deprivation and residential mobility weights on criminal activities within vulnerable neighborhoods in urban centres? This research focuses on the urban social structural theory of social disorganization, to investigate how socioeconomic, demographic, and physical characteristics affect criminal behaviour. The study adopted a qualitative research approach that is cross-sectional. With the use of volunteer self-selection sampling techniques, in-depth interviews were conducted with heads of households via a semi-structured interview guide. The data were analyzed using thematic analysis. The study found that sociological factors such as economic deprivation and socioeconomic inequality lead to the gradual integration of delinquency in cities. The findings of this research build on the existing theory of social disorganization. To ensure safety, residents’ economic status must be standardized by supporting the provision of more regulated informal sector opportunities and activities for active engagement in supervising and controlling youth behaviour. Full article

Background: Animal cruelty appears to be widespread. Competing theories have been posed regarding the causes of animal cruelty leading to conflicting findings and little direction for public policies to combat it. Objective: To assess the applicability of extant theories of the causes of animal cruelty: domestic violence; deviance; perpetrator traits; and social disorganization. Methods: Data are drawn from police department reports of animal cruelty in the City of Detroit from 2007 to 2015; 302 incidences of animal cruelty were reported. Multiple regression is used to determine the theory which best appears to account for animal cruelty. Results: Common types of animal cruelty in Detroit are shooting; blunt force trauma; neglect; and dogfighting. While most incidents involve unknown persons; cruelty by owners; neighbors; and domestic partners is also common. Neighborhood conditions in terms of economic stress; vacancy and blight; and crime appear to have the greatest impact on animal cruelty. Conclusions: The findings from Detroit support deviance and social disorganization theories of animal cruelty. Neighborhood conditions in terms of economic stress, vacancy and blight, and crime appear to have the greatest impact on animal cruelty in this urban area. Full article

A Bayesian random effects modeling approach was used to examine the influence of neighborhood characteristics on burglary risks in Jianghan District, Wuhan, China. This random effects model is essentially spatial; a spatially structured random effects term and an unstructured random effects term are added to the traditional non-spatial Poisson regression model. Based on social disorganization and routine activity theories, five covariates extracted from the available data at the neighborhood level were used in the modeling. Three regression models were fitted and compared by the deviance information criterion to identify which model best fit our data. A comparison of the results from the three models indicates that the Bayesian random effects model is superior to the non-spatial models in fitting the data and estimating regression coefficients. Our results also show that neighborhoods with above average bar density and department store density have higher burglary risks. Neighborhood-specific burglary risks and posterior probabilities of neighborhoods having a burglary risk greater than 1.0 were mapped, indicating the neighborhoods that should warrant more attention and be prioritized for crime intervention and reduction. Implications and limitations of the study are discussed in our concluding section. Full article

Purpose: Despite the growing evidence that ecological factors contribute to substance use, the relationship of ecological factors and illicit drugs such as marijuana use is not well understood, particularly among adolescents in Latin America. Guided by social disorganization and social stress theories, we prospectively examined the association of disaggregated neighborhood characteristics with marijuana use among adolescents in Santiago, Chile, and tested if these relationships varied by sex. Methods: Data for this study are from 725 community-dwelling adolescents participating in the Santiago Longitudinal Study, a study of substance using behaviors among urban adolescents in Santiago, Chile. Adolescents completed a two-hour interviewer administered questionnaire with questions about drug use and factors related to drug using behaviors. Results: As the neighborhood levels of drug availability at baseline increased, but not crime or noxious environment, adolescents had higher odds of occasions of marijuana use at follow up, approximately 2 years later (odds ratio [OR] = 1.39; 95% CI = 1.16–1.66), even after controlling for the study’s covariates. No interactions by sex were significant. Discussion: The findings suggest that “poverty”, “crime”, and “drug problems” may not be synonyms and thus can be understood discretely. As Latin American countries re-examine their drug policies, especially those concerning decriminalizing marijuana use, the findings suggest that attempts to reduce adolescent marijuana use in disadvantaged neighborhoods may do best if efforts are concentrated on specific features of the “substance abuse environment”. Full article

This paper uses spatial data of cases of intimate partner violence against women (IPVAW) to examine neighborhood-level influences on small-area variations in IPVAW risk in a police district of the city of Valencia (Spain). To analyze area variations in IPVAW risk and its association with neighborhood-level explanatory variables we use a Bayesian spatial random-effects modeling approach, as well as disease mapping methods to represent risk probabilities in each area. Analyses show that IPVAW cases are more likely in areas of high immigrant concentration, high public disorder and crime, and high physical disorder. Results also show a spatial component indicating remaining variability attributable to spatially structured random effects. Bayesian spatial modeling offers a new perspective to identify IPVAW high and low risk areas, and provides a new avenue for the design of better-informed prevention and intervention strategies. Full article

Although classical theorists tend to believe that immigrant youth are more delinquent than native-born adolescents, the existing empirical studies have shown the opposite. The current paper first gives a comprehensive overview of major theoretical explanations for the relatively lower level of delinquency among immigrant youth, including cultural perspectives, strain theories, social control theory, social learning theory, and social disorganization theory. The main argument is that immigrant youth who have not yet acculturated to the youth subculture of the host society are more law-abiding due to protections from their traditional traits (i.e., being more realistic, stronger ties with family/schools, less access to delinquent friends, and higher level of collective efficacy in homogeneous neighborhoods). All these theories are also applied to explain the generational differences in terms of delinquency: compared to earlier generations, later generations of immigrant youth are often more delinquent because they are more acculturated and the protective factors from their origins wear off over time. The continuing public and political bias toward immigrant youth has been explained by social constructionists. We further discuss the necessity of a synthesis of these theoretical approaches and the importance to examine both internal and international migration under similar theoretical frameworks in the modern era. Full article